Comments From Someone Who Has Seen Into Darkness

Unfortunately, it´s not me. But on the Swedish website Star Trek Database, a member posted that a friend of her has seen the movie. It seems plausible since the friend works with translating the movie into Swedish.

Her friend gave it 3 stars out 5 as a Star Trek movie, but 4/5 as a normal movie.

Let´s see if I can get some more info from her. Unfortunately, she hates spoilers so I don´t think she will reveal any big secrets.

Still, yes, the thread is about when they showed the first 34 minutes in Sweden. But the friend is not a journalist, but some kind of translator.

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Oh, OK. I see that, now. I was connecting that remark with the article mentioned in the first post. Unfortunately (for those of us who like being spoiled), I guess the 4/5, 3/5 scores is the most information we'll get out of him on it.

^That's not how I interpret it. A lot of Trek fans take points off for continuity discrepancies or differences in tone and style from what they're used to. It sounds to me like they're saying it's more enjoyable if you don't dwell on such issues.

I threw canon out the window decades ago. I don't give a frak about canon and I absolutely do not want it to get in the way of a good movie. Same goes for any technological issues or continuity problems. Do. Not. Care. Just give me an entertaining movie.

Also, trek has broke it's own canon/continuity hundreds of times before JJA got hold of it.

Based on what I've seen/read thus far, my guess would be that it rates lower as a Trek film because Kirk spends very little screen time:
a) on the bridge of his ship
b) in a starfleet uniform
Although the same could be said of most of the previous Trek films... they are always going rouge, against orders, etc.

^Or maybe the Khan rumor has been around for so long (since before the script was even written, remember) that it's taken on a life of its own. Repeat something often enough and people believe it's true whether it is or not.

^That's not how I interpret it. A lot of Trek fans take points off for continuity discrepancies or differences in tone and style from what they're used to. It sounds to me like they're saying it's more enjoyable if you don't dwell on such issues.

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In my experience, it usually involves talk of Gene's Vision(TM) and how Abrams' Trek spends too much time being fun and exciting and not enough time reciting the pretentious nonsense of The Next Generation.

Her friend gave it 3 stars out 5 as a Star Trek movie, but 4/5 as a normal movie.

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I find that there's no better indication that something is fundamentally wrong with a series than when something like this is said.

A good movie is a good movie is a good movie. If you have to make a bad movie in order to make good Star Trek, something is very wrong with Star Trek.

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Nobody is saying that. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Let's use a somewhat facetious example. Say they decided to make a prequel Sopranos movie, but turned it into an action thriller with a hot young cast. It may be a spectacular movie, the best action thriller of the year, but despite having the same setting and characters (at least in name and superficial characteristics), it's a bad Sopranos movie.

As a general rule, I hate Star Trek movies. Trek is primarily about the exploration of the human condition, and it’s much harder to do that in a two-hour movie, especially in the post-Star Wars age of spectacle. Every once in a while you get a decent movie out of it—The Wrath of Khan, e.g., which had some powerful themes about aging and consequences of past actions, plus a superlative villain—but mostly you get high-octane stuff that barely qualifies as Star Trek. There’s a reason why you rarely see any of the movies in a list of finest Trek tales.

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He says that to preface a discussion of how FC does work as a Trek story, but it's one of the few. Personally I think Insurrection and particularly Nemesis did good jobs of telling Trek-style stories about ideas and the human condition (though I know KRAD doesn't agree about NEM, but hey, I don't agree with him about TWOK either), but they both suffered from the way action sequences were tacked on to force them into more of an action-blockbuster mode. So they didn't work as well as they could as movies, nor did they work as well as they could as Trek stories, because the respective demands of those two things pulled in different directions.

So really, there aren't many Star Trek movies that are good Star Trek stories, even the ones that are good movies. That's not because there's something wrong with Star Trek -- it's because Star Trek is meant for television, not movies. Different media have different strengths and weaknesses, and the strengths of ST don't translate well to feature films (though I think -- and admittedly have a vested interest in thinking -- that they translate very well to prose).

^Or maybe the Khan rumor has been around for so long (since before the script was even written, remember) that it's taken on a life of its own. Repeat something often enough and people believe it's true whether it is or not.

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Could be, I suppose. But I got the impression Germany doesn't know or care who Khan is; that they were just releasing a standard descriptive blurb for their theater owners.

As a general rule, I hate Star Trek movies. Trek is primarily about the exploration of the human condition, and it’s much harder to do that in a two-hour movie, especially in the post-Star Wars age of spectacle. Every once in a while you get a decent movie out of it—The Wrath of Khan, e.g., which had some powerful themes about aging and consequences of past actions, plus a superlative villain—but mostly you get high-octane stuff that barely qualifies as Star Trek. There’s a reason why you rarely see any of the movies in a list of finest Trek tales.

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He says that to preface a discussion of how FC does work as a Trek story, but it's one of the few. Personally I think Insurrection and particularly Nemesis did good jobs of telling Trek-style stories about ideas and the human condition (though I know KRAD doesn't agree about NEM, but hey, I don't agree with him about TWOK either), but they both suffered from the way action sequences were tacked on to force them into more of an action-blockbuster mode. So they didn't work as well as they could as movies, nor did they work as well as they could as Trek stories, because the respective demands of those two things pulled in different directions.

So really, there aren't many Star Trek movies that are good Star Trek stories, even the ones that are good movies. That's not because there's something wrong with Star Trek -- it's because Star Trek is meant for television, not movies. Different media have different strengths and weaknesses, and the strengths of ST don't translate well to feature films (though I think -- and admittedly have a vested interest in thinking -- that they translate very well to prose).

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They could do a Trek movie about the human condition, but they'd have to keep the budget very low to compensate for low ticket sales.

"Exploration of the human condition" is nothing but trekkie cant; it's generally come to mean characters taking one another's emotional temperatures and debating the obvious at length before coming to the "moral conclusion" that will reassure the audience that they're thoughtful and discerning.

But I got the impression Germany doesn't know or care who Khan is; that they were just releasing a standard descriptive blurb for their theater owners.

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Which they may have assembled by doing an online search and finding one of the many, many articles out there repeating the rumor that it's Khan. I think that's how the Entertainment Weekly "leak" that it was Khan got out last month.

Like I said... this rumor has been around for years, since before the movie was even written. Well, it was just speculation and wishful thinking at first, but the meme became well-established and eventually evolved into a rumor. That's why I'm so skeptical of it. It would be just as pervasive whether it's true or not. If what we were hearing about the movie were something that nobody could've guessed in advance, that would be credible. But when it's the one thing that has been guessed and speculated about more than anything else, the one rumor that fans have been assuming would be true since before the filmmakers themselves even knew what the movie would be about, then the eleventy-zillionth reiteration of that claim is not clear evidence of anything one way or the other.

Especially since the evidence I'm seeing from interview comments and from the Countdown to Darkness prequel comic suggests that the threat comes from within Starfleet itself. The number 31 came up in the comic.

They could do a Trek movie about the human condition, but they'd have to keep the budget very low to compensate for low ticket sales.

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And that's a sad commentary on the moviegoing audience. Still, it sounds good to me. Low-budget science fiction can be smart, compelling science fiction -- see Moon, for example, or Chronicle.